We are Matt and Jake from UpLaunch - we went from full-time firemen to founders - ask us anything!

We were living the problem, as a starting point. Jake owned a CrossFit gym in his hometown, and I was helping him solve the problems that he was experiencing as he grew that business.

Once we decided that it could actually have the potential to be a business, we took a few steps to validate the value proposition. The first thing that we did was just put ourselves out there on a podcast - we gave away some content and sold a small marketing automation product (which was Matt building it on third party software).

We had a good response to that, so we reached out to the customers who bought it and tried to pre-sell the larger product. We had nothing to show for it - just Jake speaking about the vision.

When 60 people gave us their credit card for the pre-order of software that didn't exist yet, we knew it was worth it - at least enough to give it a try and start the journey.

Great question - it’s compounded further by being a fully remote team. I am a strong believer in the value of remote work, but it’s not without its challenges: loneliness is common, effective communication can be more difficult, and it’s tougher to build strong interpersonal relationships.

I’m actually surprised that I’ve been able to cope with it well - I also have three kids who keep me pretty busy, which helps.

We are working hard to crack this open company wide - we just started quarterly in-person leadership offsites, and will do another all-hands retreat in January. My goal is to do them twice a year but it is an expensive line item so I haven’t been able to commit to it just yet.

I think the biggest thing is leaning into clear, honest, WRITTEN communication. Jake poses a great question sometimes: “You might only get ten minutes a week with someone...how do you spend it?”

Hope that helped - not sure I’ve identified any great personal coping strategies (other than have a bunch of kids to hang out with, lol) - but it’s a big focus of ours from an organization standpoint for sure.

This is a good question, and has been a moving target for us to be perfectly honest. I'll outline our current process as a starting point.

First off, we've got some really target institutional knowledge "inside the building" - 6 of our team has either owned or managed gyms, and 4 of them were UpLaunch customers before they joined the team.

As far as the more tactical aspect of prioritizing feedback, our CS team will take feature requests and add them to a JIRA backlog that they own. Once per week, our CS team meets with our head of product to review any key issues that are in that list. We don't review the entire CS backlog - instead, the CS team elevates up to 5 issues that are worth diving into - they get groomed, prioritized, and added to engineering's backlog.

It's still more reactive than we would like, and not strategic enough. The critical things get surfaced and fixed quickly, but we're working towards a more thoughtful approach, which was inspired in large part by Basecamp's Shape Up book: https://basecamp.com/shapeup

To summarize, we have a process but it's not perfect, and we're still working hard to learn, refine, and test ways to make it more efficient and keep the overhead low.

"What they're worth" isn't as cut and dry as some people make it out to be - there are different risk tolerances and potential upsides depending on whether or not someone is a founder vs. an employee, for instance.

The founders (5 of us) are at a level at which we've agreed that we can sustain, and additional revenue for us will come from profit sharing and/or an eventual sale of the business.

The employees are all getting paid market rate or close to it currently. Additional upside from them will also come from a profit sharing program once it exists.

We've actually gone the other way and taken on some debt to scale the team in order to accelerate some product-led growth plans, so we'll have to climb back up the hill before we achieve a level of profit that can sustain a profit sharing program.

When we get there, we'll be doing something loosely modeled after the ConvertKit profit sharing program: https://nathanbarry.com/profit-sharing/

Hope that helps!

Jake does it all.

Just kidding. He says that coding is just hitting a semicolon key over and over and over...I digress...

So the real answer is that we started out building on third party software, with no intention of becoming a legit software company. We were comfortable in the consultative services space and wanted to leverage other people's software to deploy our strategies.

The problem was that none of the available software allowed us to do it in a scalable manner - so we ended up solving that problem too.

I went to a coding bootcamp called The Firehose Project (http://thefirehoseproject.com/) to learn to code. It was enough to start an MVP...and more importantly, it's where I met our CTO who did most of the heavy lifting to bring the platform to life.

Today, all of our dev resource is in-house - in fact we just hired our third full time engineer yesterday!!

We've put a large focus on the customer experience since day one. Because of that, we have embraced an All Hands Support policy - the CS team handles the majority of it, but everyone will chip in to help, especially as conversations need additional eyes on them.

In the earliest days, our Director of Customer Success and myself (Matt) handled the vast majority of Intercom communications. As a CEO, there is no better way to ensure that you stay in tune with what your customers want than to facilitate conversations with them and to help them solve their problems.

Around $60k MRR, we hired a CSM to work on that team, and then another part time one at around $90k. Together, the 3 person CS team handles the vast majority of first-line Intercom chat along with most onboarding and usage related questions. However, the rest of the team will still chip in from time to time, especially when people from CS are off work or have lots of back to back calls.

At the end of the day, people pay us to solve their problems - so we've made sure to instill that in our team as well. If a customer has a need, we make time to solve for it as best we can.

We absolutely tried literally every product on the market before starting our own. We didn't initially have aspirations to become a SaaS company - we were in the consultative services space, and were pretty happy there. However, nothing fit the bill, and we were hedging our reputation on the line when it came to fulfillment, bugs, and other issues that resulted from trying to jam a round peg in a square hole.

There was a specific day when we decided to go the SaaS route - I remember specifically turning to Jake and saying, "If we're going to f*ck this up, I at least want it to be my own fault." What that meant was that I wasn't 100% sure if we could build software that would hit the mark, but I wasn't going to keep letting our customers down without trying it.

And wow, I'm glad we did - I wouldn't have it any other way. Failing to try would have resulted in UpLaunch never getting off the ground.

We did both for over a year before it got serious enough to consider leaving. The trigger point for both of us was that our CTO went full time before we did - as leaders, that felt wrong and didn't sit well with me. If we couldn't bet on ourselves, how could we ask anyone else to bet on us either?

Jake and I were still making precisely zero dollars at that point - it was still a gamble, but it was one that we had to make. We planned out ahead of time to tighten our belts, but also set a hard deadline - if we weren't personally making at least $40k in 1 year after we left the fire department, we would figure out the next move.

Shocker, we didn't hit that mark - but luckily, the momentum was heading in the right direction and we decided to keep pushing. Everyone always says things like "people quit right before they were about to succeed" - there are two sides to that, because I also think people will keep doing things that don't work forever because they're blind to the fact that it's not working. However, in this case, we just needed a little more time and a few more adjustments and we started to hit our stride.

There was a decent amount of surprise from the fire department - Jake and I were both company officers with bright futures, and no one really expected us to go another direction.

Oh well...SURPRISE!! (lol)

We've got a bunch, which is amazing to be able to say. One of our customers named Ben spent tons and tons of time building out a crazy lead nurture system using Google Sheets, Zapier, and 4 other SaaS platforms. He was able to switch to UpLaunch and stop using all of that stuff and then move to Australia for 6 months while his gym continued to grow (it's in San Diego, by the way). He ended up believing in the cause so much that he came to work for us on our sales team, which is amazing.

We also recently published a blog post about a customer named John Kelly, who has added over 40 members and had his best month in 6 years after implementing UpLaunch (https://www.uplaunch.com/40-members-three-months/)

We've helped over 15,000 members start their fitness journeys across all of our gyms, which is incredibly rewarding - we love helping fellow entrepreneurs in any way that we can!